time, and not just a grin.
I was in the water, waist deep, watching for Wally, looking for a seam, a handle, any indication of a trapdoor. I knew the stringers below were probably creosote-soaked timber. Out here the wood would rot in no time in the constant moisture even if it was up above water level. I found the timbers green and slick with algae. The odor was ripe in the way a compost pit would be if you stuck your nose into it. The fingers of my left hand were curled up over the edge of the deck and I was using the flashlight in my right to beam the spaces between the stringers. My feet were squishing in muck and it took effort to pull each one up out of the suction and take a step down the line. My ears were tuned to any stirring in the nearby grasses, any grunt from a large predator with a bad eye. I worked my way all the way around three sides before the light caught a raised anomaly in the otherwise black-green underbelly of the cabin. Spotting down parallel stringers there was an edge, barely an inch difference, protruding from the flat board surface. It was about eight feet in from where I stood.
I had to let go of the deck and it felt peculiar to me to hesitate doing so. I also had to dip deeper into the water, to my chest, to get my head down under the first stringer, and I thought twice about that movement also. There was something spooking me about being deeper in the dark murk that had not been there before. I shook it off and, keeping the flashlight above water, reached for the next handhold while pulling my boot out of another sucking hole. From close up, the edge I’d spotted became a square, positioned between two stringers. I scraped at it with the edge of the flashlight. Metal. Again of the stainless variety to resist erosion or rust. In the shadow of the wood beam I found the handle, a lever really, of the kind you see in submarine movies or on oven kilns. There was no key entrance on the rounded end, an indication that it did not lock from this side. I twisted and it moved, slightly. I put some muscle into it and heard the internal cylinder slide. It would make sense of course that an escape hatch would not be locked to keep rescuers at bay, if that was indeed what it was for. When I heard the click of metal snapping loose of metal, I pressed up on the door. Stuck. I had to reposition my feet so I could get some leverage and tried again, this time with my forearm, and I heard the sucking noise of a seal being broken and the door finally gave way. Once open, the smell of sweet musty air poured down over my head and face, air that had not mingled with its outside brother in a very long time.
EIGHTEEN
Harmon was thinking about some half-baked Hollywood movie scene of the dedicated hero searching for his drunkard partner when he parked behind the beachfront just west of A1A and started up the sidewalk to the infamous Elbo Room. He knew Squires would be there. He was always there when the weather got rough. The hurricane had left a feel of some dusty Mexican town in its wake. The cyclical wind had come off the ocean in the second half of the storm and sand from the beach was drifted up against the curbs and around the doorways and sheets of it were still swirling in the streets. Later the maintenance guys for the city would be shoveling it back up over the low retaining wall but now they were too busy shoving splintered trees off the roadways and assisting emergency power crews with downed utility poles. It had been a bit of an adventure driving through his neighborhood and then making the circuitous route all the way to Las Olas Boulevard and east to the ocean. He’d been redirected by roadblocks three times and twice had to use side streets to get there. Luckily, they’d closed the bridges over the Intracoastal Waterway in the down position, not that anyone was fool enough to move their boats, though you always heard of some idiot who was racing for the dock or had been torn off his anchorage during the blow.
At